Special libraries and community…

I just returned from the Special Libraries Association (SLA) conference in Denver. The SLA is an (inter-) national association for librarians working in less-traditional settings (think corporate, news, competitive intelligence, etc). I’ll blog more about in the next couple days, but for now …
The conference included some highlights, such as an Al Gore as keynote discussing our current inability to use information wisely in decision making, Michael Tiemann from redhat making some interesting points about a copyright and patent system gone awry, and some great information about microformats and how they’ll enable information sharing and searching for social networks.

With the good you sometimes have to take the bad. In the same session as the microformats (“Mining Social Neworking Sites: Rich Resources Lie in Wait for Those Who Dig”), I was disappointed to hear Regina Avila, assistant library director tell of the Denver Post library’s “innovative” mining of social network sites. They use these sites to dig up information on minors to help reporters who are researching news stories. The actually mining doesn’t bother me– I’m a former reporter myself and know you gotta get sources — it’s the idea that they are doing this and obviously haven’t considered the ramifications (and potential chilling effect) this practice could have at a time when lawmakers, educators, and parents are trying to limit access to these sites. This is one you’ll hear more about from me later.

By the way, we’re sorry for the posting lag. It’s graduation week (actually graduation day!) for Kathleen and I. The past couple weeks have flown by with little to show on the blog. I’m sure we’ll make up for that soon.

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2 Responses to “Special libraries and community…”

Your mention of the presentation on mining social networking sites reminds me of a story on NPR’s On the Media I heard a couple of weeks ago about the relative permanence and accessibility of online postings and artifacts that bear people’s names. Emily Nussbaum, a writer for New York Magazine, asserted that people 25 and under look at this stuff in a very different way. She argues that this generation has grown up with an awareness that everything we do is tracked and stored, and that they accept this as part of the reality of their lives. Nussbaum seems to suggest that most younger people who post on social networking sites realize that the information they provide in these environments may be consumed by all sorts of entities, known and unknown.

After reading Nussbaum’s article, I’m not quite convinced of this. While I buy her point that there’s a generation that has grown accustomed to living online and has consciously traded privacy for openness/exposure, I’m not sure that most teens fully grasp the implications of this. But I do suspect she’s right about most teens having at least some awareness that their MySpace pages can be seen by plenty of people besides their friends and classmates. So I’ll be curious what sort of chilling effect Tim foresees resulting from schemes to mine these sorts of sites.

That’s a good point, Bret. I’ll check out Nussbaum’s article and keep in in mind when doing my “full” post on the topic.

For now, I’ll just say that I think that “under 25” is a pretty large spread and these people’s understanding of concepts like “public” and “forever” and “mining” are going to vary a lot – maybe on age/maturity lines, maybe based on experience, maybe something else.

I had a class with a large number of undergrads this past quarter and I find it kind of telling that a large number of them didn’t really understand how facebook and linked-in served totally different purposes. It didn’t seem to occur to them that you’d want a “sanitized” online profile for career purposes.

I wonder if the problem is as much “ours” (over 25s) as theirs… they may have an awareness that everything is out there and an expectation that it is going to be used — but I wonder if there is also an expectation about _how_ people will use the information (ie responsibly?)?